Since joining the Washington University faculty in 1986, artist Ron Leax has built a national reputation for rigorous yet playful sculptures and installations that explore the natural world while interrogating the language and concepts we use to describe it. In Leax’s work, the familiar taxonomies of empirical knowledge — books, catalogues, sample libraries — are overwhelmed by the very forces they seek to master.

This fall, more than three dozen alumni of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, where Leax serves as the Halsey C. Ives Professor of Art, contributed artworks to “Ontology of Influence.” Curated by Arny Nadler (BFA ’91), associate professor and chair of undergraduate art, the exhibition pays homage to Leax, who will retire at the end of the semester, and to the concepts, approaches and aesthetic concerns he helped to pioneer.